1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to graphics processing, and in particular, to a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for radially tessellating a region with shapes of any order, while maintaining a fluid user experience.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a post-production creative pipeline, users often need to create new textures. Textures can be mapped onto objects or simply used as backgrounds. In such a context, there are great chances the user wants the texture to be animated (e.g., over time) or patterned. A common way of creating patterned textures is the repetition of a certain region of a source image, with or without applying a symmetry transformation to it, creating tiled textures (if repeated in a grid space) or kaleidoscope-like textures (if repeated in a radial space).
In the context of automated pattern repetition, a tessellated grid can easily be made by flipping a rectangle shaped region. Triangles and regular hexagons can also be tiled to tessellate a region. However, with higher orders of shapes (e.g., regular decagons), a grid-like tessellation is impossible. Accordingly, what is desirable is the capability to automatically create a pattern with high order shapes. In addition, it is desirable to animate a pattern over time. To better understand the problems of the prior art, a description of patterns and textures is useful.
In the prior art, a user may desire to utilize a mosaic texture. To create such a texture, the user manually selects a region and then manually places triangles or other shapes into a scene to represent the mosaic. Thus, all actions required manual actions by the user. Further, in the prior art larger patterns became difficult for the user to work with and manipulate while smaller patterns required extensive manual placement. As a result, the prior art techniques are not flexible and don't allow automatic tessellation of an entire frame.
Mosaic or texture applications of the prior art are also not fully integrated into the software applications for which they are used. Accordingly, the mosaic/texture applications have limited access to tools in terms of animation. Further, prior art mosaic/texture applications are not flexible with respect to parameters the user can utilize. In addition, radial patterns are not available in the prior art. Instead, a grid-like representation of a texture is used and repeated.